But what could it be? He had no kinsman near enough in blood to "affect his honour." But these French fellows had such queer phrases. The only transaction he could think of was the sale of his black charger in Calcutta for two hundred guineas, to that ill-conditioned fellow, Colonel Bardell, who, he heard, had been grumbling about that bargain, as he did about every other. "I should not be surprised if he said I cheated him about that horse!" And he felt quite obliged to Colonel Bardell for affording this hypothesis. "Yes, Bardell was coming to England--possibly at Marlowe now. He knows Sir Jekyl. Egad, that's the very thing. He's been talking; and this officious old French bourgeois thinks he's doing a devilish polite thing in telling me what a suspected dog I am." The General laughed, and breathed a great sigh of relief, and recalled all the cases he could bring up in which fellows had got into scrapes unwittingly about horse-flesh, and how savagely fellows sometimes spoke when they did not like their bargains. CHAPTER XXXV. The Bishop at Marlowe. So he laboured in favour of his hypothesis with an uneasy sort of success; but, for a few seconds, on one sore point of his heart had there been a pressure, new, utterly agonising, and there remained the sense of contusion. The General took his hat, and came and walked off briskly into the city a long way, thinking he had business; but when he reached the office, preferring another day--wishing to be back at Marlowe--wishing to see Varbarriere--longing to know the worst. At last he turned into a city coffee-house, and wrote a reply on a quarto sheet of letter-paper to Monsieur Varbarriere. He was minded first to treat the whole thing with a well-bred contempt, and simply to mention that as he expected soon to be at Marlowe, he would not give Monsieur Varbarriere the trouble of making an appointment elsewhere. But, seated in his box, he read Monsieur Varbarriere's short letter over again before committing himself, and it struck him that it was _not_ an intimation to be trifled with--it had a certain gravity which did not lose its force by frequent reading. The gentleman himself, too--reserved, shrewd, with an odd mixture of the unctuous and the sardonic--his recollection of this person, the writer, came unpleasantly in aid of the serious impression which his letter was calculated to make; and he read again-- "I have certain circumstances to lay before you which nearly affect your honour." The words smote his heart again with a tremendous augury; somehow they would not quite fit his hypothesis about the horse, but it might be something else. Was there any lady who might conceive herself jilted? Who could guess what it might be? Jennie's letter he read then again in his box, with the smell of beef-steaks, the glitter of pewter pots, and the tread of waiters about him.